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Two days ago, we developed our first answer to the inefficiency puzzle of war. If war is the costliest way to resolve disputes, while negotiations (which themselves typically follow war) are cheaper (if you can use them first to get to the same outcome), why fight? Our first answer involved disagreements about the likely outcome of the war and communication difficulties that stood in the way of creating agreement (the information problems explanation), but today we focus on a second broad answer to the puzzle: war as a commitment problem (for academic treatments, see this and this.)

(Before we get going on that, though, a quick note is in order: the inefficiency puzzle is a difficult one to grasp. When we say that war is inefficient, we don’t mean that the costs always outweigh the benefits; we only mean that the costs (a) exist and are (b) less than the costs of negotiations that can produce the same result as fighting. In fact, if both sides are fighting over something they didn’t have beforehand, they can both be better off than they were at peace, yet the war would still be inefficient—the belligerents still destroyed stuff to divide this new thing up rather than divide it up without destroying that stuff. I digress, but, students, take note: this is a difficult and subtle point, so don’t assume you’ve internalized it just yet. Keep thinking about it.)

Now, on to the topic of the day. How else might we explain why war occurs if not by information problems? Our second main answer to the problem derives from two facts: (a) nothing stops states from starting or threatening a war if it’s in their interest and (b) their ability and willingness to start or threaten war can change over time. More after the fold. Continue reading →

Last week, we discussed the salient features of the international system, which allowed us to say something about the issues over which states disagree and (sometimes) fight: the placement of borders and who governs the territories within those borders. This week, we’re moving down one level, from the system as a whole to the disagreements that emerge between those states that populate the system. What we want to know now is why some of these disagreements are resolved violently while the majority are resolved peacefully. (This is “War and Peace in East Asia,” after all.) War is deadly, destructive, and wasteful, yet most of the time it produces something that states can have without having to fight first: a negotiated settlement. Why fight, only to produce a treaty that one could’ve written down beforehand and that doesn’t waste blood and treasure?

After finishing last week with a discussion of the logic of the Anglo-German Naval Race, we did a more inferentially-minded exercise today, examining the four “big” great power crises of the early 20th Century: First Morocco, Bosnian Annexation, Second Morocco, and the First Balkan War. The reason we talk about them is quite simple: to understand why war happens, we must compare it to instances were war was averted, lest we find ourselves affirming the consequent in some bizarre claim that, say, great power crises (or armies, or uniforms, or maps, or alliances…) cause major war. So today was just as much about the logic of inference as anything else, but we got to do it by building up a narrative about the crises that led up to the war, revealing information over time about the extent of the Russian recovery from defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, both materially and over its willingness to impinge on Austrian interests in the Balkans.

The basic logic went something like this: in each of these crises, we saw great powers willing to match each other’s cooperation (that is, avoiding open conflict) with cooperation, and they were able to signal peaceful intent at key points by limiting their military mobilization—in some cases, foregoing substantial amounts of combat power by releasing conscript classes they could otherwise have held over (a costly signal of peaceful intent, indeed). Information problems arose over one great power or another’s willingness to fight, and they were able to use costly measures to back up statements of intent; interestingly, though, the challenge for the offensively-minded governments of early 20th Century Europe, it wasn’t about credibly signaling resolve but a lack of it—it was more difficult to say, “no, we really won’t fight” than to say “yes, we really will fight,” which might go some way to explaining why costly signals of reassurance, not costly signals of resolve, went a long way to explaining the peaceful resolution of these disputes.

It’s also instructive, I think, with respect to the preventive motives that would ultimately push Germany towards war; from 1905, when Russian weakness made France pessimistic about resolving the First Moroccan Crisis with war, to 1913, with the Russian economy recovering at a good clip and rearmament with French funds proceeding apace, Germany seemed to be watching for one thing: an indicator that Russia was rising fast enough—in arms and willingness to use them—to make a preventive war attractive. By 1914, when Russia tipped its hand over willingness to intervene on Serbia’s behalf, Germany’s information problem, which was a question over whether the time had come for a preventive war, was solved; we moved from a world dominated by informational problems, resolvable by costly signaling, to one dominated by the commitment problem, where uncertainty is beside the point.

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. [Slow down, Scott.] Tomorrow, we pick up in 1913-14, as war looks inevitable to some on the Continent and demands that they firm up plans and strategies for how to fight it…